Modern industrial control systems have enabled factories and plants with machinery to become partly or wholly automated. The various processes, assets, parameters, alarms of a plant can be monitored and controlled via the use programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that are coupled to the machinery. PLCs can be controlled via higher level systems which can comprise graphical interfaces such as, HMI (Human Machine Interface). Traditionally PLCs have had limited ability to store and process data structures so that values stored in the memory of the PLC are free floating and do not include context information. Improvements in this area have led to the development of protocols, such as, OLE for Process Control Unified Architecture (OPC UA). Plants can include legacy control systems that have PLCs which store unstructured data that does not comply with the latest protocols and hence does not include context information. Other control systems can have PLCs that are protocol-compliant and are therefore configured to store structured data that includes context information. Accordingly, different software applications for handling structured and unstructured data in a PLC need to be developed in such environments.